Set the tone

Lev­els & Curves panel Ac­cess this pow­er­ful colour-edit­ing panel in the Edit sec­tion at the right of the workspace. Here we’ve un­docked the Lev­els & Curves and the LCH pan­els and used Win­dow>Edit to hide docked edit­ing pan­els for a cleaner workspace. RGB This drop-down menu de­faults to view­ing and edit­ing points on all three RGB Curves at once, chang­ing tone rather than colour. Ad­just­ing points on each in­di­vid­ual colour chan­nel can pro­duce cre­ative colour changes (see the walk­through be­low, and our ac­com­pa­ny­ing video). Colour chan­nels Here the high­lights in the red chan­nel have been pushed up and its shad­ows dark­ened, cre­at­ing a clas­sic S-curve. The blue Curve’s high­lights fea­ture a more se­vere dip, which helps add a cyan hue to lighter patches of sky. Gamma You can ad­just a range of colours in a chan­nel by plac­ing an an­chor point on a Curve and drag­ging it up or down (see point 7). Al­ter­na­tively, se­lect a Curve an­chor point and drag the Gamma slider right to make the point dip, or left to raise it up. Th­ese ad­just­ments to the ini­tially di­ag­o­nal Curve change the way that the RGB colours mix to­gether, pro­duc­ing cre­ative changes in colour. Rese t chan­nels Tin­ker­ing with Curves can dra­mat­i­cally shift colours and tones. Click here if you need to re­set the RGB chan­nels. LCH Panel The Light­ness, Chroma and Hue panel en­ables you to use Curves to change a range of im­age prop­er­ties. We’ve set the drop-down to ad­just Color Light­ness. Add an­chor point By click­ing on this icon you can then sam­ple a spe­cific colour by click­ing an eye­drop­per on the im­age. Here we clicked on the sky to add an an­chor point to the blue sec­tion of the Color Light­ness Curve. We then dragged the an­chor point down­wards to darken the sam­pled colour. Width Once you’ve sam­pled a spe­cific colour, in­crease the spread of the ad­just­ment to in­clude sim­i­lar colours by in­creas­ing the Width value here. Do­ing this en­abled us to darken a range of blues in the sky. Reg is­ter ad­jus tment Once you’ve ad­justed a shot’s colour Curves to pro­duce a dis­tinc­tive look, click on this drop-down menu, then Reg­is­ter Ad­just­ments. Type in a la­bel to help you iden­tify your fil­ter and click Re­name. Click OK. You can now ac­cess and ap­ply your cus­tom fil­ter to other photos from the Lev­els & Curves panel’s drop-down menu.